stories matter. institutions matter. the only reason to start a college is because you can do things with -- it takes other people to do things you can't do by yourself. so, i think what we're doing right now here on this campus is entirely unique. i think you have to go back to 1930s and 1940s to find a place, a small place on a hillside that has such contrast with the arts. we're bringing the top writers, musicians, designers, and a year from now filmmakers and branch into dance, all these in montpellier, vermont, and this is an essential gateway for the larger culture. it's very exciting and makes me want to come into these old building and my third floor office. >> for more information on this and other cities visited by c-span's local content vehicles, visit c-span.org/local content.

>> michael grunwarl with his thoughts on the reinvestment act. this is about 50 minutes. >> thanks all of you for coming and braving the rain. i'm really thrilled to start my tour here in new york. my wonderful parents are here. i think they're the only new yorkers who go to florida to visit their grandchildren. yeah. there are a lot of facts and figures and fun characters and colorful stories in this book, but i knew it would be controversial. ises is revisionist history of the obama stimulus, and just about everybody hates the obama

stimulus, and sometimes it feels like obama hates it, too, and won't say the word stimulus anymore. it's hard to blame him. a year after the task a percentage of americans who believe the stimulus created jobs was lower than the percentage of americans who believed elvis was alive. at one point, i told a story how obama told his cabinet that this stimulus was the only thing less popular than he was in any case, when you put the words change and obama this close together you're going to get yelled at. and the new new deal, right wingers don't accept the old knew del and left wingers don't think this spineless sellout of a president is fit to share a book jacket with the new deal. so i had a feel something readers wouldn't get past the first four words, and i was right. a few weeks ago i got this google alert that the new new deal was in the new republic. i was psyched because i've written a lot for that magazine.

have a lot of friends there. i click on the link and it's a blog post by a 23-year-old researcher who announces right away he couldn't even make it to the first page. sure enough, he couldn't get past the first four words. but not these first four words. so, i'll quote. i it was so disturbing so washington, i had to put the book down. addressed to a woman i can only assume is grunwalds wife, it reads to christina, my stimulus. this twit was trashing my dedication page. and i don't think the terrorists who are trying to kill salomon rushdie ever trashed his dedication page. so washington, said this kid who lives in washington. i woman i can only assume is grunwalds wife.

i can only assume you're single, dude. he says, if christina really is his stimulus, does that mean she kept him from collapsing into an unprecedented depression? if we accept the definition of stimulus as something that rouses or incites to activity, the note comes across as a strangely explicit display of wonky ribaldry. come visit us in south beach, kid. we'll show you something. my stimulus is here tonight -- wait, where -- there she is, and christina did prevent me from collapsing into a depression. anybody who has ever written a book can empathize with. she most definitely rouses to activity. and it's like, change that diaper. and, yeah, obama's stimulus did, too. the $800 billion american

recovery and reinvestment racked, signed less than a among after he took office. may become a national joke but really did prevent america from a great depression and it launched over 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, bridges, subways, sewer plants, military bases, fish hatcheries, i can go on all day and it's transforming america's approach to energy, education, health care, transportation, and more. it's one of the most important and least understand pieces of legislation in modern history. the short-term recovery part as well as the long-term reinvest part. always the pure is disstillation of what obama meant by change. a major down payment on owl of his biggest campaign promises, and the story of the stimulus is not only, i think, kind of fun and gripping story, but it's a microcosm of the obama era.

it's the best way to understand the president, his policies, his approach to politics, his achievements, and his troubled marketing those achievements in a city that's gone bonkers. it's also the best way to understand his enemies. this book documents the republican plot to destroy obama before he even took office. you always heard about and it imagined it must be there. but i actually got some of these guys to tell me about it. these secret meetings where eric cantor and mitch mcconnell planned their path back to power. so, before i open this up to whatever you want to talk about. i want to talk about the stimulus, because it really is a new new deal. and then a bit about obama because i think there's both more and less to him than meets the eye. you know, i spent nine years as a reporter at the washington post before i escaped the beltway with my florida girl so government is not a new topic for me, but i do not think i could have written this book if i still lived in washington. the group think is just too

strong. and it is almost impossible to overstate the power of the d.c. conventional wisdom that the stimulus was a ludicrous failure, and it's totally uncool to talk about it without rolling your eyes and making little ironic comments, ha-ha-ha, you totally stimulated the economy when you gave that panhandler a dollar. even obama joked after his annual thanksgiving par down that he just saved or created four turkeys. my friends here, they know that i do have a contrarian streak. i don't really do group think. i'm a guy who visited the gulf after the bp spill and wrote that the environmental damage was being wildly overstated. i was right. i had data. but arguing that the stimulus was a new new deal wasn't just considered contrarian. it was considered delusional. like arguing the bp spill didn't happen.

we can discuss why. it was the combination of relentless republican distortion, incompetent white house communications, brain dead media coverage, really the unfortunate timing of a jobs bill that passed when the u.s. was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a among. the financial earthquake hit but the economic tsunami hadn't hit the shore. fortunately in 2010 i was a thousand miles away and was pretty oblivious to the prevailing stimulus narrative. but i did become aware because i write a lot about the environment, that the stimulus included $90 billion for clean energy, which was leveraging another $100 billion in private capital. those seemed like typos, and the united states was spending maybe two or three billion dollars a year on clean energy before the recovery act in 1999, washington completely knocked president clinton's pie in the sky plan to spend 6 billion over five years

for clean energy. it was dead on arrival in congress, and obama got $90 billion in his first month and before his staff could find the bathrooms in the west wing? just ridiculous. the stimulus was pouring unprecedented cash into wind, solar, energy efficiency in every imaginable form, advanced biofuels, electric vehicles. cutting edge research, smarter grid, cleaner coal, factories to make the green stuff in the united states. and it was by far the biggest energy bill in history. so kind of got me curious about what else was in this stimulus that everybody was laughing about. i remember i did some dogged investigative reporting. no. it was a google search. i leonard they stimulus launched race to at the top. have you heard of that? i heard about it. knew it was a huge del in the education reform world. it was supposed to entirely

transform public schools. but i had no idea it was stimulus program. did any of you? >> no. i had no idea. >> son of a gun. anyway, it became clear there was a huge story hidden in plain view. most of the stimulus was just standard keynesian stimulus, pumping money into the economy when the private economy had gone into hiding. trying to generate demand through tax cuts for 95% of the work force. gigantic checks to states to eye avoid lay you'ves of teachers and cops and basic infrastructure project. and it as has $27 billion, with a b to computerize our pen and paper healthcare system so your doctor doesn't killive with his hand writing, authorize a new rail network this biggest transportation initiative since the interstate highways highwayd extended our high speed internet

network to serve rural communities, including america right-hand side biggest push into industrial policies since fdr. the biggest infusion of research money ever. it modernized unemployment insurance which hadn't changed since the new deal, and launched new approaches to preventing homelessness, financing public works, overseeing government spending, you name it. and, by the way, the top economic forecasters a guy it stopped the terrifying free fall. gdp was crashing 8.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008. that's a depression. at that rate would would have lost an entire canadian economy worth of output in 2009. but it's funny. the job losses peaked in january 2009 right before the stimulus passed, and that spring the jobs numbers, which were still really grim, they had the biggest quarterly improvement in 30 years. so, i asked, -- i told this to

my editors at time magazine -- i hope they're not here -- they were -- they're like, wow. totally lying. they were like, what? the stimulus? that was old news. unemployment was 9%. what else is there to say? things could be worse? i'm like, yes, things could be worse. actually, flew up to new york to make my case in person. i could see their eyes glazing over as i was talking about this stuff. i told them i felt like a reporter in 1938, trying to convince them they aught -- ought to do a story on this presidential initiative called the new deal. they looked at me like i was that blogger in newsroom pitching a story about big foot. to their credit they eventually let me write an article how the stimulus was changing america, which led to this book, and they let me keep writing about this bizarre roar world stimulus that was on time, underbudget, fraud

free, impressively managed, full of good government reforms and totally unlike the stimulus everyone else was making fun of. it really is a big deal. and it really is a new new deal. i'll read a bit from the passage where i explain why... it didn't create giant armies of workes like the wpa and ccc. it didn't establish new entitlements like social security and deposit insurance, or new federal responsibilities, like securities regulation and labor relations. it didn't set up work fair program for the creative class, like the federal theater project, federal music or art project. obama aides gruesomed it could have used a new federal writers project to turn out better prop began dark and -- propaganda, at didn't raise taxes, it reduced

taxes for most workerses. obama and his aide thought about the new deal when they were assembling the act, but it's like apples to bicycles in comparison. while fdr had contradictory initiatives, the stimulus was one piece of legislation cobbled together and squeezed through congress before most of the appointees were nominated. the new deal was a -- the recovery act was just a bill on capital hill but is was an astonishingly bill big. wait more than 50% bigger than the entire new deal. twice as big as the louisiana purchase and the marshall plan combined. as multibillion dollar line items were being eerased and incertained obama aides who served under president clinton occasionally caused to recall their futile push for a stimulus that seemed impossibly huge in 1993. there were battles over a few

million bucks forks beloved programs that seemed to trivial to discuss. after a live microphone calls vice president biden calling obama's health care the big frigging deal -- we're on c-span -- i suggested to the chief of staff the stimulus was big. bigger, mcclain replied. we probably did more in that one bill than the clinton administration did in eight years. one advisor toll mel...

seattle's market and the ferry terminal but the new deal will be changed. that is also its main theme. now it's not a new deal. obama is not a classic new deal liberal and while we share some of the traits, self assurance bordering on ego mania, the pedigree and even keel and allergy to ideologues he's not the second coming of fdr. he didn't grow up rich and he didn't battle polio. he doesn't welcome the hatred of the elite and he hasn't forged a bond with the masses and understand roosevelt's mistrust

and takes his campaign promises much more seriously than fdr ever did. but the recovery act did update the new deal for a new era. was obama's one shot to spend boat loads of money. a down payment on the agenda of curving fossil fuel dependency and carbon emissions, modernizing health care and education, making the tax code more progressive and government more effective and building a sustainable and competitive 21st century economy. let me talk a little bit about obama because this is about his vision. i would like to reveal some new pathology or psychological theory. his dad was an economist. but really you should read david maraniss for that stuff. i'm afraid that obama in this page is basically the same no drama cerebral flow brad pressure comfortable in his skin somewhat aloof almost comically

reasonable alpha male that he will ever find in the biographies. there are funny stories about him. in october of 2008 after the lehman brothers collapse and the mccain campaign was in putting along with the economy obama quipped to one of his advisers are we sure it's too late to hand this pile of crap over to mccain and the party that created it, and the adviser said it's probably too late. obama says at least we are buying wealth. not low enough, it turned out. in december when his economic aid called with the first jobs report, she blurted out i am so sorry mr. president the numbers are just horrible. he said it's not your fault, yet. at one point david axelrod was in the white house and he wondered what would be like to

govern in good times. the president just laughed at him. are you kidding? we never would have gotten the job. one thing my book does the other books don't is to get obama through the lens of his belief and his policies. i've got a lot of fly on the wall conversations in the white house and the background on capitol hill but this book also gets inside of battery factories and high-speed rail and yet the facility of that infamous solar manufacturer i think it's name was solyndra. my approach was trying to figure not what he's doing and this is the most important thing you should know about barack obama. he's mostly tried to do what he said he would do. he came into office with a well-defined theory of the case and he tried to put it into practice. i promise the book is more interesting than that. his campaign agenda didn't attract very much attention partly because everybody was a

obsessed with his race and the ads comparing him to paris hilton partly because his agenda was mostly the standard democratic agenda reversing the bush era and investing in the future. he cares a lot about policy but he's not a policy entrepreneur and the campaign wasn't about new ideas, it was about this relentless message of change and that aspirational we can believe an addendum says maybe he would follow through on the old ideas that never seem to go anywhere and he has. except for those ideas about changing washington and moving beyond the partisan conflict. those didn't really pan out. there's an awful lot of partisan conflict in this book and here on the upper left side i should probably be telling war stories about kobach versus the republicans, but because i'm a contrarian, i thought i would read just a little bit on my take on obama versus hillary because i think it helps

actually explain the next four years. the case for obama wasn't a substantive case for changing policy. hillary was making a similar case with a resume. the case for obama was a political case for why those policies never seem to change. it implied that hillary was part of the problem that america couldn't afford another decade, that the political pettiness and nastiness that exploded during the clinton era was the fundamental obstacle, the fundamental change. hilary's one word explanation for the persistence of the status quo was republicans. obama's one more explanation was washington. the endless spin cycles in the industries and pulled driven platitudes that made tough choices and common sense compromise impossible. as a symbol and as a participant hillary was inextricably linked at washington gridlock machine, the bickering and parsing, the eternal litigation of the 60's.

she could never make a credible we are one people speech or bring people together to solve these problems. she tried and failed with her husband's health care plan. the case was that she knew how to fight republican, she was comfortable in the muck. the case for obama is he could move politics beyond the. they were always a means to the end of changing those policies. in springfield when he announced his campaign for president, he listed the main problems he was running to solve. a dependence on oil the threatens our future, a health care crisis, schools where many children are not learning and families are struggling from paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can they argued real solutions would be impossible until washington moved beyond the noise and the rage. was stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of the sound policies and sensible plans. what stopped us is the failure

of leadership and the ease with which we are distracted or the chronic avoidance of tough decisions and our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems. the was the essence of obama's case against hillary clinton, and was wrong. turnout was possible to make progress on the long-term problems even while washington remained distracted by the petty and the trivial. the proof would be in the recovery act and produce dramatic change in energy, health care, education and the squeeze on the family's the four pillars of the new foundation for growth without any working consensus for any pause in the scoring of political points. this is a book about change. the first word of the book and change requires 60 votes in the

united states senate. obama took office during an economic cataclysm and he decided that in an emergency changing the country was more important than changing the capitol. the central drama of the book is literally the middle central section. silda pushed the change into law in the first month. it wasn't clean and pretty. rahm emanuel is in the middle of it and it wasn't suitable for younger years either. but the whole stimulus debate is a case study in obama to the disillusionment of the left but proved that obama was just like every other politician. more interested in cutting deals and trading james desperate to compromise with republicans who were only interested in surrender. to the fever swamps on the right it revealed obama is a euro socialist radical who is a full - chicago style partisan and a wimp who is deferring to his leftist congressional overlords of the same time.

he was pretty much what he said he was. a data oriented left of center technocrat that was above all a pragmatist comfortable with compromise, and willing to sacrifice the good in pursuit of the ideal it was the first evidence that after the campaigning of the change on the system outsider he would govern as a work the system insider but despite all of his talk, he understood they don't produce change. the stimulus is producing change. it's not producing perfection. it's making these better. before the stimulus less than 20% of doctors use electronic medical records. by 2015 just about all americans would have won. the would have 7 million americans out of poverty and that homelessness prevention program at 1.2 million people off the streets. so the homelessness population actually declined during the

great recession come after the great recession. an obscure program called build american bonds financed $180 billion worth of local infrastructure projects. it was like a stimulus tucked inside of the stimulus and nobody noticed it. i spent a lot of time explaining how they launched the clean energy revolution, doubling the renewable power creating a domestic battery industry entirely from scratch jump starting this margaret etc etc. we've reduced dependence on foreign oil lowest level since 95 and the carbon emissions are dropping even though the economy is growing. all you hear about is the solyndra scandal which isn't even a scandal. it's supposed to symbolize how solar panel is a mirage and mitt romney called imaginary but thanks to the stimulus the solar installations have increased 600% in 2008. obviously the economy is struggling, and it's fair to point out that obama and his recovery act hasn't lived up to the initial height but nothing

in life lives up to the hype. that i just mentioned from the? i invited. he has put the stimulus in the center of this presidential campaign which is actually totally appropriate. there ought to be a great debate in the country about government intervention in the various sectors in the economy and how the government should respond to the downturn. most of the items in the recovery act enjoyed bipartisan support until january 20, 2009 and every 2008 presidential campaign candidate proposed stimulus package actually the largest was that romney akaka but it's legitimate to debate the lessons going forward. it ought to be about the actual stimulus and not some imaginary stimulus that outsourced wind turbines to china. actually the stimulus double the domestic content of the u.s. turbine's and also the u.s. when production. we are using the this crazy stimulus that shuffled money to the president's cronies.

there hasn't been a single to lead a single example of a corrupt deal and i exposed the first case in a situation room to get them to approve the loan but when he resisted the white house backed off and incidentally the was the same that need the: speed and he said there was no pressure on that one. so we are moving into another election about change and the central question is whether the government is capable of contributing to positive change. the stimulus is becoming which is weird because it really ought to be exhibit a for the argument that it can. i realize i probably sound like jim obama cheerleader. it is an uncomfortable role for me and there is a funny scene towards the end of the book i'm talking to vice president biden who oversaw the stimulus and he let me sit in on the cabinet meeting devoted the stimulus and basically is giving me a hard

time. you are the only one that wrote anything remotely positive. and usually more devotee downer than mary sunshine and my friends will back me up on not keith. it took them to bed, i slept on them. i didn't get into journalism to tell stories that joe biden would want to cuddle with. you know, what i did is i followed the facts. my stories only look glowing compared to these ridiculous dhaka that passed for the stimulus journalism and it's like i said about bp. i've seen the data and it is all in this doorstop so i hope that you'll read it for yourself to it i would like to take your questions with the stimulus and the president and what ever you want.

>> thank you for writing this book. i am one of those old-style liberals. i share with you in appreciation of all that was done by the recovery act but i have two sources of frustration. the first one is he should have been a better horse trader and asked for a whole lot more because common sense says the more you ask for the more you will get. and my second reservationist where are the sound bites from his campaign if not from the story that michael grunwald as telling? he needs to be taught how to speed data. he needs to be taught how to give a good interview pinch. we are not getting that from the campaign, and i think that he is letting the republicans told the story and he's only very weakly

responding. >> thank you i talked to somebody pretty high of in the obama campaign that said the same thing. i wish we told that story as good. you're first question, your first point about he should have gotten more, my answer to all of these questions is going to be read the book, but read the book. he really couldn't have gotten one diamond more out of congress. some people are aware that there were three republican votes for this thing. arlen specter and that when princesses from maine as one congressman called them and they were not willing to do one dime more than $800 billion but what people didn't realize is that there will also half a dozen democratic senators who would draw line in the sand at

$800 billion this is the theme of the obama presidency that when you need 50 vose and chief of the president mark begich of alaska, nothing is going to happen unless it is acceptable to him and it is a high wire act. if you don't think there was enough horsetrading you have to read the chapter is where rahm emanuel was going to work on this thing. the bottom line is they went in and they said we want and 80/20 of what congress wants and congress can get 20%. the end up getting 85/90. and they did in that falling of with another $700 billion worth of additional stimulus over the next two years. of course obama didn't make a speech saying i want another stimulus because then it's like everybody is getting the stimulus. and it wasn't easy because he was facing a very hostile republican party even on things like unemployment benefits and the small business tax cuts that have always been central to the

bipartisan philosophies. but, it's hard to see how he could have gotten a lot more. we can't run a double blind study of the different political economies where she communicated better and i definitely talk about them in the communication mistakes that he made. but i always urge people to think it is possible that this black guy whose middle name is hussain isn't a total political idiot or at least that he didn't suddenly become one on january 20th, 2009. a lot of the stuff is really tough to sell your program when you've got double-digit unemployment. >> thank you so much for writing the book. i look forward to reading it -- i look forward to learning more of the stimulus. before i read it to buy have an

intuition i would like you to comment on? the issue that so much money was spent on seems very complicated, very sophisticated and my intuition is that to spend money when requires time and thought and study, and i'm hearing you say a lot of money was spent. was it spent well commanded did we get the best bank for the buck? >> again, read the book. [laughter] buck off, you know, this is -- the question was essentially that it's difficult to spend $800 billion there's a lot of different programs. did we get a good thing for the dhaka. this was implemented by in perfect people and was passed through an extremely in perfect legislative process.

that said, the gap between its reputation and what it's actually done is really startling. before the stimulus, when you talk to independent from experts they were warning that five to 7% of the stimulus could be lost to fraud. now some of it is not complicated. you are talking about some of it is really easy to spend. you know, there's $300 billion worth of tax cuts read it's pretty easy to give tax cuts and you are basically sending people their money back. there's $200 million of aid to the states which are just getting to the states so that they don't have to cut their teachers and copps reduced their medicaid services. we know how to give out to under $50 checks to seniors like the stimulus did or food stamps or unemployment benefits. but the stuff that was actually spent people expected there would be a lot of fraud, five to

7%. well, so far they put basically the toughest investigators in washington who broke open the scandal and he caught the oil regulators that were sleeping with oil executives to oversee the stimulus, and they found so far $7.2 million worth of from which is .0%. on was flabbergasted. it's ridiculous. republicans, democrats, communists, everybody ought to be celebrating this. so why do tell lot -- i don't want people to run for the exits but i do telson implementation stories that are a lot more fun than the sound without the weather is asian division which was known as the turkey farm at the department of energy because it's impossible to get rid of

public employees if he got rid of the program first would put all of the worst employees there and i told a story about a woman that came in and shook up the farm. it has a happy ending where the with the recession program that got off to a horrible start and everybody would terrible stories ended up getting into shape and nobody's written any stories about it but also they called themselves we be here and you'll be gone and they were right they ginned up some ridiculous thing where she hired somebody without going by the rules it's hard to make change but there is a lot of good government reform and the stimulus. the biggest one is the tried to do a lot through competitive programs so through the entitlement mentality where a free transportation project if

you done your minority hiring report in your small business hiring report and traffic studies you get a check. check the box, you go. instead now when the stimulus you have to show that your project actually had economic and environmental value not just shuffle ready but shovel worthy and that is a radical concept in the federal government. why don't you wait for the microphone. >> two things why did the president give priority to health care rather than double down on jobs which was the more critical situation in the country at the time and still is , and somewhat related to that

why didn't he or his people try to go over to have congress and appeal directly to their constituents including the comment constituents and eric cantor's constituents in their own district? >> the first questioning why do you focus on health care instead of jobs? oprah's asked that question in 2011. why did you start off by giving health care instead of jobs? the first thing we did is the recovery act. rahm emanuel would joke that it's one of the dumbest things they did it succeed too quickly. they pass the recovery act and just three weeks. it should have taken six months it would have looked like he was focusing on jobs but instead he got this thing done.

then he was on to the although bailout which was also part of our job but he got that done fast. certainly health care was politically difficult. wasn't clear if he had been sitting there talking about jobs that would have been a lot better. the fundamental problem as he passed the bill and jobs were still disappearing. if he had been out there saying people would have said you just past stellas and it didn't work which they of course said anyway. he ended up getting more stimulus by not talking about it and just working quietly through congress. the question is why didn't he -- i asked david axelrod a question very similar to your second part for which is fighting one question a lot of us have about obama is that his campaign in 2008 had broke all the rules. he's giving speeches in the stadium, blowing off democratic interest groups to invite them

to the debate, john kerry wanted to endorse them before new hampshire and he said no. he's on the internet, social media, and i said to axelrod i don't have a better idea for how they could have done this but why don't you break the rules in washington? and axelrod's answer was essentially because it's washington. it's not america. but there really are if you are prisoner to the tyranny of 60 votes, and obama really does believe were certainly did believe that if we get the policy right, the politics will sort of take care of themselves. he said that was blowing down from the top. they took this almost perverse pride and like we are going to put our heads down and do the right thing. the best example of that i tell in the book is for democrats your head will explode when you read this is the story of the

tax cuts. you may remember in 2008 pushed to the stimulus it was $180 billion the center for the checks. here's the money. and obama is essential we did the same thing except for the czech part because the beah neuroeconomics shows that when you get checks you are marginally more likely to put it on that a bank instead of spending it and the whole point of the stimulus is to spend it so the right thing to do would be to decrease withholdings and get a couple hundred extra dollars in their paycheck every week they won't notice it and that we they will be more likely to spend it. except they won't notice it. we are denying ourselves our moment. that squeals of delight when you get your publishers clearing house check and mail. so, you know, i talked to one of the policy guys afterwards and

he sort of explain that this made very good sense but in retrospect was totally stupid. i talked to rahm who said the opposite thing. we have to rip the friggin to people's friggin paychecks so they spend it. so we did the right thing. the policy was right and you could tell like 100% of him believed they couldn't do the right thing. you know, the -- like i said i don't think they suddenly forgot how to do politics. but as you can tell from the last few months, there is an ethos in the administration that the politics are not the same thing. obama will say things like that sometimes. i'm pretty good politics but others would say that it's always the time to do politics and i think that's when you are getting at.

>> could you talk about what you see as the role of the mainstream media covered the stimulus as to what has been received by the american public? didn't have to the polarization that people were going to believe what they want to believe and just political reporting in general with respect to how the news covers things nowadays? >> i don't care that we are on c-span. the media sunk. they were horrible. i had a lot of fun. actually i had a big file that just said gotcha and starts to get relief that and this poor guy yet these investigative reporter was actually a very good investigative reporter but they had served put him on the stimulus and i just sort of went through everything he wrote because he would write the stimulus is spending too much in the rural areas. they're spending too much money in urban areas.

my favorite story he rode was there are spending to slow the than the numbers started to show the case study was michigan. michigan isn't getting enough stimulus money. he didn't mention in that story that five of the six new battery factories that they were building in the stimulus or in michigan. but then after saying that they were not spending money fast enough, then he finally did one that says i'm trying to remember that line. something like traffic set to flow as the stimulus years upper. finding the cloud in every silver lining. all this roadwork people are going to be very upset about. it did have an effect. the first big stimulus story that got play you might even remember it the phantom congressional district. remember $80 billion going to phantom congressional districts.

they were typos. people tight like the had the wrong zip code for congressional district like the money didn't go to the wrong congressional district was just filed long on recovery.gov but that made national news and $90 billion clean energy, so i don't know how much of an impact it had but it couldn't have had none. >> so, mike i will read the book so you can't give that answer. there was a promise when obama in february 2000 lane came out, one of the things he said is if we pass the actual create 2.5 million jobs and created a narrative of this would create employment and then somehow create return to a happy employment picture. if that hadn't been part of the promise it also would not have been part of the expectation

that people then were disappointed by the end of wasn't part of the lesson of this don't overpromise and under the liver, under promise and over deliver. >> was in january, 20009 that they put out the report the 8% report which was stupid. i have a lot about it in the book and they had this kind of sinking feeling and they put in all of the caveat. there will footnotes that said it could go to 11 or 12% but nobody reads the dam footnotes. and what they would say in their defense partly is that they needed to put a jobs number on this to get through congress and that the members of congress who just spent $700 million on a bank bailout are being asked to spend another 800 billion that they couldn't go to their constituents without saying it's going to create 3 million jobs and the punch line is it did.

there was an 8 million-dollar job hold and a did as they predicted and that stupid report it did increase gdp two to 3% all of the major economic forecasters agreed there had been a dozen independent studies that have gone and looked at the actual stimulus, they are all very positive. but of course the situation was worse than they thought. i mentioned the gdp had fallen 9% in the fourth quarter of 08. that's true that the time people thought the numbers were 4%. for present is to double what 9% is epic calamity. so, there was a real debate inside the white house about how much this should be sold as a jobs bill. biden was one of the people who felt they shouldn't just be numbering jobs they should be talking more about the new deal aspect of it and kind of sympathetic to that view as well but these were understandable mistakes they were mistakes.

>> the government enterprise has to give people jobs, do you agree or disagree? >> i agree and if there is a lot of debate inside of the administration that this didn't create many government jobs. it saved some government jobs of the state level but in the obama. eventually lost public-sector jobs so the government has gotten smaller and the private sector may not have done fine as obama said the of the day but it's certainly doing away better than the public sector. instead there were some moments in the book where in the fall of 2,009 they were the same people that did the report that was so stupid, but christie roemer were

both thinking about can we do a sort of thing there was one thing like that in the actual stimulus where they did this wage subsidy program or the states and nonprofits could hire people and was actually a welfare to work program which was ironic given what we are hearing now, and even haley barbour, the republican governor of mississippi loved it and it was creating 250,000 jobs at $5,000 per job so it was an incredibly successful program. chris the rumor started calling government agencies to say if we gave you unlimited money how many people could you higher in the next year? we could hire a lot. 20,000. she would be like the roosevelt administration hired 4 million people in the winter of 1934. he actually gave a presentation where he had a few different ideas and then the third idea

was a national inventory of structures. basically the idea was that they were going to take people that were working on the census survey of 300,000 people that already had their clearance and you are going to keep them on to do this national inventory there would be very helpful for data collection and planning purposes and joe biden's guy was like just stop there. i might be able to sell something where we are going to build buildings. i am not going to be able to sell something where we count buildings, so the national inventory structure went nowhere. i think the feeling was that this isn't the new deal. there is no political appetite for trying to create massive government bureaucracies. it's a lot harder to stand them up these days and essentially in a way fdr kind of had it easy because the big government hadn't been created yet. so, you could have something

like the ccc hurt a million urban youth out of their cities and send them to the work camps they were actually known as concentration camps before that term got kind of uncool and they were paid a dollar a day and they sent the money to their moms. i just don't think that would fly today, and it's hard to know. maybe if he had barnstormed the country and said that we needed a new ccc maybe it would have worked but i don't think that's what happened the last few years would suggest that that is the case. with that i need to stop but i will be signing books and i really appreciate everybody coming out in the rain. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's website, michaelgrunwald.com. in 1927 a flood caused much damage to point montpelier have

become landmarks of the community. book tv export several other landmarks in montpelier during the city tour to speed the democracy takes its movement which began in rome and then has really evolved into a whole idea of the local war movement and the local people say this is crazy. the real food system is set up a lawyer with bringing in tomatoes from 3,000 miles away we get them here and it tastes like cardboard. that doesn't make any sense. we have the capacity in our own community to foster and develop relationships between farmers which is all of us and it has a very vital and the livelihood system. we felt what is the insight that we could take from slow food.

right now washington is like that faraway farm that is generating these laws and that tomato that taste like cardboard is like the mandates that come back from washington so what can we do that is vital in our own self governance locally? in vermont we have so many at how the individuals and towns and counties have been able to get really exciting work on the local level. so this is where the action is coming and i still think that is incredibly important. what i learned over the course of writing the book was the importance of dialogue and deliberation and that couldn't come easily for me to be it i don't like meetings, i don't like sitting there. i think when can i get home, so i was not as convinced that it was so important for us to get together and have conversations and things like that, but

working with susan and seeing the example talking about these different examples of communities in action really convinced me particularly in parts of new hampshire they were in the middle of this bitter redistricting site in their community and was a rich elementary school busting up the seems and the obvious answer was to move to the two other ones, but they went through this whole process where they were able to create circles so that these people from both communities could come together and realize what they had in common and at the end of the day they came out of it with a very specific plan that involves moving a small number of students. school politics are some of the bitter that you can get. people get really budding head-to-head and so for them to

be able to do that, and to take these possibilities that were not there in the national conversation you are either for or against, there are two places to be and they were able to develop a very practical on the ground solutions to problems that wouldn't have been possible if they were not investing together and talking about these issues. what we do in this book is we said just three basic principles for any slow space process. so this might apply to the town meetings for the purchase of porcari budgeting but peace process easily to be inclusive and bring everyone to the table. the need to be delivered to it so it isn't just voting or an up or down type of situation it has to be people discussing with the most basic values are because you can have those conversations and they can be great but at the end of the day you are not

allowed to impact your own government. so those are the three elements that we have identified and there are many different forms of process these that can fulfill all three elements. one of my favorite examples is looking at the chicago community policing and they wouldn't necessarily think of themselves as the democracy because they were developing the process he's without that free-market but in the early 90's they had a terrible relationship between the police department and the citizens so they said how can you prove this? and the began holding monthly meetings in each of the police districts and inviting both police officers and community members. they would sit there and say okay what are the challenges in this particular district? what are their residencies challenges and these are people that had been chasing off on the floor, and in one particular community in the north side of chicago there was a park that was really over a lot of shrubbery and as a big drug

dealing center so the dealers would go in and hang out in the shrubbery and then there were drive-by shootings of course associated with that and the residents came and said what are we going to do? and so together they were able to identify okay, here are the conditions that are allowing these drug dealers to be here. they have this covered so they went in together, they really instead the park and the police committed to doing walk-throughs in the park and the residents that live in the nearby housing project committed to calling and when they saw suspicious activity in the park so as a result, the crime in the park dropped instantaneously so that is a great example of something that would have never happened if you didn't involve the community and the police officers talking together.

michael author susan clark is a dialogue and collaboration expert that knows all about running for different kinds of space process tease. she is the town moderator and so she was able to draw on her network of all of the different exciting things that are happening in dialogue and deliberations. she is also is with fellow that put out the connections there and get really exciting example of what is happening in the democracy and historians. but i was able to do is to show how the public process has really finn doubt over the last two centuries. when did tocqueville can he solve these talents with everybody engaged in the space process waiting in the command gradually over the course of the 20th century and until now we have this preface for the democraticol